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As marketers we often feel that we are like a ringmaster at a circus. I repeatedly hear that quintessential organ music in my head when I think of the numerous marketing programs we currently have in place. As with any good circus, I want the best acts possible in each ring. After all, who wants to see an inferior sword swallower? The same is true with your digital marketing vendors. In addition to having the best performers, it’s important that each act is seamlessly integrated to create a fantastic show that attracts a large number of spectators.
So what does integrated marketing actually mean? Of course it depends on who you ask, but for me it means that all my digital marketing efforts are working in concert to create an equation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Traditionally this has been pretty difficult to accomplish, as most remarketing systems don’t talk to analytics systems, and personalization efforts aren’t typically aligned with either of them.
Some digital marketing vendors have valiantly sought to solve this problem by owning a large section of vertical solutions through building their own integrated products or purchasing companies to complement their own offerings. In some cases this alleviates the pain associated with silos of marketing, although as many have found it’s hard to be the best across all these solutions.
Tealium has always taken a lot of pride in bringing disparate vendors together to provide better management and to considerably increase the value of the individual solutions. In the tag management space, it’s not just about turning tags off or on, or allowing you to easily transition from one vendor to another, it’s also about creating synergies where they did not previously exist.
In many ways the unified data layer created by Tealium iQ, our enterprise tag management solution, is the perfect mechanism for this. The data is not only the basis for better tag deployment, but also provides an easier way to obtain valuable insights about your audience that can fuel your marketing applications much more cohesively.
With our new AudienceStream platform we can now take that a step further through enrichment and distribution of audience profile data to your existing marketing application vendors or internal data warehouse. In this way, it is possible for Tealium to act as the glue that ties together your initiatives through unified, enriched and actionable data.
Here’s an example of this integrated marketing approach in action. Through your web analytics solution, you may find a segment of your audience that constantly visits your e-commerce site, but never makes a purchase. You can leverage AudienceStream in order to alert your personalization or A/B testing tool the next time this audience segment visits your site, and provide an attractive discount offer to encourage conversion. If this offer is not accepted after multiple tries, you can use AudienceStream to alert your retargeting vendor to make sure that audience segment is no longer marketed to, saving you money on an audience that will likely not convert.
So, fellow ringmasters, let’s bring all of our best performers under one big tent and put on a marketing show that captures the imagination of your audience and makes your traveling show a critical success.
